There was nothing she could do as the flaming Air Canada DC-8 roared past her family’s sheep farm, nothing but scramble out of bed and hear the plane hit the ground in a field to the southeast. All 109 people aboard Flight 621 from Montreal were dead. Lynne Genova was 13.

Star
photographer Boris Spremo was the first journalist to arrive. The first thing he saw was a flight attendant’s red dress hanging from a tree branch. Then he saw body parts. Eventually, wandering through piles of debris, Spremo came across perhaps the most poignant sight of the macabre tableau: a broken and burned doll.

Montreal’s Lynda Fishman, then Lynda Weinberg, was also 13 on July 5, 1970. To her, the doll had a name: Barbara. It belonged to Wendy, her 8-year-old sister. Wendy, 11-year-old sister Carla and their 39-year-old mother, Rita, had been flying to Los Angeles, where Lynda had flown earlier, for a bar mitzvah.

The Flight 621 crash was the worst in GTA history. Air Canada erected a memorial to the victims at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, where the remains of about half were buried. The crash site near Castlemore Rd. and McVean Dr. in Brampton, however, was never marked. When pressed, Air Canada insisted that the Mount Pleasant memorial was sufficient.

To Genova, now a City of Toronto employee, this was an insult — an affront not only to the victims and their families but to the members of the rural Castlemore community where the crash occurred. In 2005, she told a gathering of the Brampton Historical Society that the site demanded a tribute of its own.

“I was helpless on July 5th, 1970. I couldn’t do anything on that July 5th or the days after that,” she said this week. “But I could do something now.”

Genova heard nothing for three years after her presentation. Then, in 2008, she was told that the residential developers who had purchased the farmland on which the crash site is located wanted her input on a memorial they were going to design themselves.

On Sunday morning, a day before the 40th anniversary of the crash, more than 100 people, including relatives of 10 to 15 victims, will gather at the site to lay 109 roses.

They will also discuss the memorial scheduled to be completed in 2012. At Genova’s suggestion, it will include purple lilacs like those common in the farming village of her childhood.

Fishman attended a meeting where a rendering of the memorial-to-be was unveiled. She sobbed at the sight of the trees.

“I was so composed until then. But when I saw the purple lilacs, I absolutely fell apart,” she said. “Those were my mother’s favourite flowers.”

Flight 621, which
was to make a brief stopover in Toronto en route to Los Angeles, approached Toronto International Airport, now Pearson, just after 8 a.m. on a sunny Sunday. It was flown by Captain Peter Hamilton, a respected veteran of World War II air combat, and First Officer Donald Rowland.

The two men had waged a long-running argument over when to prepare, or “arm,” their spoilers, the wing devices deployed upon landing to reduce a plane’s lift and assist in braking. Hamilton preferred to both arm and deploy the spoilers when the plane was on the ground. Rowland preferred to arm them when the plane was in the air.

As the DC-8 approached the tarmac, Hamilton cheerfully surrendered. “I have given up,” he joked in a conversation preserved by the cockpit voice recorder. “I am tired of fighting it.”

His conciliatory gesture led to the error that triggered the chain of events that brought the plane down.

In the DC-8, the spoilers were both armed and deployed using the same poorly designed lever. Instead of simply manipulating the lever to arm the spoilers, as Hamilton wanted, Rowland unthinkingly deployed them.

The plane hit the runway hard. Hamilton decided to go airborne again, and make a long circle around the airport, instead of attempting to land immediately. “We’ll go around,” he said. “I think we are all right.”

He was wrong. Hamilton did not know, and the tower did not tell him, that the DC-8 had dropped one of its engines on the runway. It was also on fire.

Three explosions and about three minutes later, Flight 621 plummeted into a field about 50 metres from the home of a Castlemore truck driver.

Forty years later, debris
still surfaces now and then through the soil at the crash site. Brampton’s Paul Cardin, who also lobbied for the memorial, has found bones, Air Canada cutlery, seat markers, and chunks of fuselage during dozens of visits there.

Lynda Fishman, a wife and mother of three who runs Adventure Valley Day Camp, will make her first visit tomorrow. Though she now lives in Thornhill, she could not muster the strength to even visit Brampton until this spring — and the site itself has always seemed unwelcoming to her.

“I couldn’t just go to a big field,” Fishman said. “That’s so heartless and cold, and so disrespectful. I couldn’t do that. So to have this memorial is incredibly meaningful. There has never been any place to really go and visit.” Mount Pleasant, she said, is “beautiful, but...” Her voice broke. “I would say that the only place that really is appropriate to have a memorial is where they all died.”

The memorial, funded by the three numbered companies that plan to build homes on the site beginning in 2011, will include a plaque, a garden, and a small cemetery with 109 ground markers. The developers will pay an archaeological firm to transfer soil from the area potentially containing bone fragments to the cemetery.

Air Canada will send a representative to the Sunday gathering. Fishman, who said the company has treated her family poorly over the years, objected to its decision to do so; she called it a public relations exercise that will detract from the experience of the families present.

Air Canada spokesman Peter Fitzpatrick responded: “This was a terrible tragedy and it is understandable that the pain continues. . . We felt it was appropriate out of respect for the victims and their families, and also to commemorate the crew members who also died.”

Aside from that, Fishman is upbeat. She wrote and self-published an inspirational memoir,
Repairing Rainbows
, about how she eventually managed to “choose life” over despair. On the book’s cover: Spremo’s shot of Wendy’s doll.

Fishman’s family held a funeral for Wendy, Carla and Rita, but nobody was sure how much of their bodies were in the boxes of remains sent to Montreal from Toronto; the family was warned never to open them.

Tomorrow’s ceremony, Fishman said, is “almost like the funeral that we didn’t really have, almost like we’re going to the proper funeral.”

“And then,” she said, “when we come back in two years, when the memorial is built and the gardens are all built — that will almost be closure. It’s about time.”

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